17May 05

As pop gets more explicit, it’s easy to become nostalgic about acts’ creative attempts to smuggle drugs and sex into their songs. But most of the time the references work the way they do in “Day Tripper” – she’s a big teaser, she’s a day tripper, subtle stuff there lads! The song’s a frustrated goodbye, but who’d really blame a girl for having fun with boys whose eagerness to please is so apparent? I had it in my mind that this was a track where the Beatles rocked out, and the riff/backbeat matrix reminds me of the Stones’ recent hits, but there’s a neatness, a pertness about this band on this record. The breakdown could be the chance to nail the riff to our skulls but the band’s ascending, harmonised “aaah”s turn it into a big pop celebration instead. And it’s wonderful, but I’m left wondering who exactly are the teasers here.

The tambourine from “Day Tripper” shows up on “We Can Work It Out”, where everyone sounds more relaxed. Paul McCartney uses precisely banal language to deliver a lesson in reasonable conflict management in the verses, with Lennon’s witty harmonium humming in agreement. From my perspective, grown up in a house which owned a copy of Sergeant Pepper’s and not much else (by anyone!), the waltz-time middle eight is the first time the Beatles really sound “Beatlish”, the storied makers of reassuringly delightful songs.

Comments

I like both of these songs about equally, and yes, they do seem poised between what had already come and what was to be – I don’t know if this is where Oasis start with their Beatles influence, or whether that comes later. (I think it does.)

Why two songs though? How did that work as a single? Would radio stations play both songs, back to back, or what?

Some singles are officially classified as “double A sides” and are listed on the charts as such. In theory this means that radio programmers are free to play both, in actual fact this doesn’t often happen. With some singles the ‘switch’ happened halfway through the record’s life, as the record company asks DJs to play the other side in an attempt to prolong its chart run.

The double-A side lives on in the era of 2 CDs per single: the last one to top the chart was, I think, “Flap Yr Wings”/”My Place” by Nelly.

I reserve the right in Popular to be entirely disproportionate in the attention I give to each side of a double-A!

Huzzah! Tom’s back! One feared that “The Carnival is Over” finished you off for good!

That being said, I was at first baffled by the 7–then I thought fair enough for a double A-side: 8 for “Day Tripper” and 6 for “We Can . . .” So, then, OK.

Because I’m working on a book (tentatively titled Britannia Waives the Rules) which examines the effect of the “Permissive Society” legislations on British literature and culture (collapsing the distinctions between “high” and “low” art), I found the comments about “smuggling” sex and drug references into the lyrics interesting. It was so very daring then–and absolutely quaint–charmingly so, I think–by today’s standards.

Last week, I ended my queer lit course with the novel Breakfast on Pluto (in which, in one scene, the characters sing “We Can Work It Out”) and spent a whole class session showing video clips–including one of the Beatles stoned out of their minds and miming “Day Tripper”–of 60s British acts in order to contextualize the pop culture fantasies of the protagonist. Most of the class loved it. (A few looked puzzled or distressed.) Strange thing is, a extraordinary number of these twenty-year-olds know many of these songs–they were singing along with them. No one can convince me that, since the sixties at least, pop music isn’t the most influential cultural tradition of the postmodern world.

And yes, this record is an almost paradigmatic example of a certain “Beatleness” that still brings me cheer whenever I hear it.

When it comes to re-makes, “Day Tripper” must have accumulated one of the oddest assortment of artists ever. Along with those already mentioned, I find at All Music Guide: Lulu, Anne Murray, Otis Redding, Mongo Santamaria, and Whitesnake.

Okay, so it’d be better to hear personal responses to these songs, but this is Cover Heaven, so let’s add in, for “Day Tripper”, Booker T & The MGs, Whitesnake and ELO. And for “We Can Work It Out”: Big Youth, Dionne Warwick and Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons.

And in these 2 songs you have the transition from backbeat driven pop-rock to the beginning of their psychedelic soundscaping period. It feels as though it’s a natural shift, as if they were destined to play around with the limitations of what the traditional four-piece beat group were capable of.

Day Tripper’s chief attraction is that riff that sucks you in, then the easy humour of the lyrics. Lennon again. (“Are you a Mod or a Rocker?” a plucky journo asks “I’m a mocker” Lennon says, or was that George? It should be Lennon). The Fab 4 are at their most likeable, yet they’re about to challenge everything, including the question: are we really pop?

We Can Work It Out always seemed to me to come from late-period Beatles rather than at this point. It must be Paul’s lazy or resigned delivery, the way each verse is hurried, almost slurred. Then that dreamy waltz-time carnival comes into view bursting with ideas and possibilities. The “show” is barely beyond the horizon. An escape from the limitations of the 4-piece beat group.

oh no tom, you fell (several years ago) for paul’s trick! i’m always mazed that no one ever picks up that his verses in ‘we can work it out’ are the precise opposite of reasonable conflict management. what he’s actually saying, in the most maddening tone possible, is that it is unreasonable for the other person to disagree with him and that the only way they are going to get any peace is if they jolly well sort themselves out and admit that he was right all along (or he’ll dump them). i do have a lot of time for macca but listening to this you can totally see the character traits that drove the other beatles mad in the end.

the year began with a variety of expressions of male angst at broken relationships directed to the woman in question. Here ,in contrast, Lennon talks to US about her, putting her down with a sense of irritation that might sound bitter if it were not for the energy of the song itself. He doesn’t sound heartbroken just pissed off for having his time wasted. WCWIO initially sounds more positive, and musically it feels quite open and welcoming but there’s a return of the circus motif in the verses (alongside the ‘fussing and fighting’ lines) similar to the one that we heard in ‘I got you babe’ only here it serves to highlight a slightly pious and lecturing tone from McCartney.

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